


See the Light Surrounding You

by spibsy (lucy_and_ramona)



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Crushes, F/M, Flirting, M/M, Multi, Nuisance to Friends to Lovers, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 07:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21334753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucy_and_ramona/pseuds/spibsy
Summary: When Richie first got shacked up with six other chaotic personalities in this place by student housing, he hadn't thought it would work out without any of them killing each other. Things, though, hardly ever happen the way we think they're going to.
Relationships: Beverly Marsh/Richie Tozier, Bill Denbrough/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon/Ben Hanscom/Eddie Kaspbrak/Beverly Marsh/Richie Tozier/Stanley Uris, Bill Denbrough/Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Stanley Uris, Mike Hanlon/Richie Tozier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 174
Collections: Poly Losers Club Fic Exchange





	See the Light Surrounding You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queenjameskirk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenjameskirk/gifts).

> hello, friends! this is a fic written for the poly losers fic exchange, written for cryingbilldenbrough on tumblr! it's also the first fic i've ever written in this fandom, despite having read this book and shipped these characters when i was, like, nine years old. 
> 
> this fic is definitely a poly fic, but i've tagged the pairings that have the most blatant presence within the story itself, for clarity.

Richie’s really used to having his own room. It’s not that he doesn’t love sharing an apartment with six strangers or anything, it’s just… he’s used to being able to throw a shirt on the floor if he wants. Which is most of the time. He’s not used to there being other people in his room because it’s also their room. He’s also not used to those people being neat, tidy human beings who don’t like it very much when Richie throws his shirts on the floor.

The others are great. Really, Richie couldn’t have asked for more when he found out about the living situation for this semester. He thinks he might even be friends with the others for longer than he absolutely has to be, which is very new and exciting. He likes them, all of them, genuinely. He’s used to pretending to like people so much that it’s exhilarating to not have to.

It’s just that he really, really likes to be messy.

“For the love of fucking god, Richard,” the voice of one of his darling tidy roommates chimes like a little but very loud doorbell. “If I trip over any more of your stupid boots, I’m throwing away every single pair of shoes you own.” 

“Aw, Eds, come on,” Richie responds. He doesn’t look up from the rousing game of Minesweeper he’s currently dominating on his piece of shit laptop. “They’re Docs; they were expensive.”

Eddie snorts. It’s very charming. Richie thinks a lot of things Eddie does are charming, but that’s not a conversation he needs to have even in his own thoughts. “You got them out of a dumpster behind the art building, you lying fuck.”

“I didn’t say they were expensive for _me_,” says Richie. He delicately selects another gray square. He doesn’t even care about this game. He knows he’ll never beat it. He just knows that Eddie gets that cute grouchy look on his face if he thinks Richie’s not paying attention to him. “They were like a hundred and twenty buckaroonies fresh out of the box. Someone spent that money, Eds. Just ‘cause it wasn’t me doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a hell of a waste to throw ‘em out.”

“I literally—” Eddie cuts himself off. Richie spends a very amusing ten seconds imagining the look that might be on his face before he gives in to temptation and looks up at him, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“It’s only hurting the planet,” Richie adds solemnly. “I thought you loved trees and shit.”

“These shoes are literally made out of fucking leather, Richie; they’re made out of dead fucking cows and it is not saving the planet to walk around with literal animal carcasses on your feet—”

“You ate a bacon cheeseburger like two hours ago—"

“You guys,” says Stan, weary, nudging Eddie out of the doorway with his hip. “I really gotta study for this midterm and I’m not gonna be able to if you’re arguing the whole time.”

“You could study in the living room,” suggests Richie.

“Bev’s showing Ben and Bill a bunch of her yoga videos,” Stan says. He sits at his desk, opening his computer. “I think she’s probably just getting a kick out of watching them roll around on the floor like idiots. I didn’t want to get involved.”

“I don’t know how you can possibly study in here,” says Eddie. He’s got that little sulk on his face, the grumpy pout that makes Richie’s brain do backflips in his skull. “Don’t you get distracted by all of the—” He waves his hands around aimlessly. “—_stuff_ all over the place?”

Stan smiles. Richie likes his smile almost as much as he likes Eddie’s wrinkly little frowns. He probably should have put something about this on his residency application. _Way too into boys to share a living space with several of them._ The other day, Mike dumped a bottle of water over his head after his morning jog with Bill and Ben, and his shirt started clinging to his stomach muscles, and Richie had legitimately felt faint, like a Victorian lady seeing an ankle for the first time.

“Of course,” says Stan. It takes Richie a second to remember that Eddie had asked him a question, and it takes him another second to remember to pretend to look offended about it. “But my space is the way I want it.”

There’s a quiet moment where Richie and Eddie both look at Stan’s desk, his pens and books lined up in perfect parallel lines and the floor beside it clean as a whistle. There’s such a clear line of demarcation between Stan’s space and Richie’s that there might as well be a force-shield surrounding Stan’s desk.

“I really wanna drop some applesauce or something on your desk now,” Richie admits.

Stan’s smile doesn’t change at all, but Richie feels a chill go down his spine. “I wouldn’t,” Stan offers mildly. He puts his earbuds in with a half-wave of acknowledgement and turns to the screen of his computer.

“He’s really scary sometimes,” says Richie.

Eddie clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says. He nudges at a jacket on Richie’s bed. “Just—please don’t leave your shoes out in the middle of the doorway,” he requests in a way that sounds like a demand. “I keep tripping over them and if I break my neck I don’t have medical insurance so you’d have to pay for my hospital bills and I know you can’t afford them. So. Please.”

“Sure thing,” Richie offers. He clicks another gray box. Wow, he’s actually doing pretty well.

Eddie squints at his screen. “Here, I’ll help,” he says. He reaches over Richie’s lap, and while Richie’s having a quiet pulmonary embolism, he clicks on a gray square surrounded by like eight ‘4’s and a ‘3’. It is, of course, a mine. Eddie grins at him sideways, Richie has his second heart attack in the span of thirty seconds, and Eddie practically skips out the door.

“You’re an asshole, Kaspbrak!” Richie shouts once he catches his breath. Grumbling, he starts another game. He’s pretty sure he’s still smiling, though. His face aches like he is.

He doesn’t see Eddie again until that night in the kitchen, when they all tend to trickle in and eat whatever they can find in the fridge. Bev can cook a little and Ben is basically a food magician so he can whip up delicious dinners out of a bag of frozen peas and a dream, but the rest of them tend to forage for scraps like feral boars. Richie’s made a meal out of a box of dry spaghetti noodles. He and Bill had passed the box back and forth, nibbling miserably until Ben had come home from work, called them both dumbasses of the highest order, and put a pot of water on to boil.

He’d made them eat the cooked pasta plain, too, to teach them a lesson. Unluckily for him, Richie has never learned a lesson in his life.

He’s eyeing up an unopened box of cavatappi when Eddie nudges him. He’s shockingly strong for such a little guy, and anyway, Richie would have moved if he’d asked.

“Ben’s taking a vote on what’s for dinner,” Eddie says, following Richie’s eyeline. “Since we’re all gonna be home, he figured he’d do something special. You’re the deciding vote, fucknuts, come on.”

“What are the options?” Richie asks, following Eddie into the living room. “I vote for your mom’s—”

“I will kill you where you stand,” threatens Eddie.

“Eds, that hurts,” Richie says. He holds a hand to his heart. “But then you wouldn’t have a tiebreaker.”

“We’ll manage,” Ben breaks in, deadpan. “Alfredo or marinara?”

“Oh, wow, what a choice,” says Richie, tapping his chin. “Well, let’s weigh out our pros and cons, here. Marinara stains worse, and I _will_ drop some of whatever we eat on the floor, so we gotta be prepared for that.”

“You could not do that,” Stan says. He doesn’t sound too bothered about it, though, probably because he’s sitting next to Bill, who has his arm slung around Stan’s shoulders. Richie doesn’t blame him. Hard to be bothered about anything in that situation.

“It’s not like I’d _try_ to,” Richie says. “But to thine own self be true, right? What bible verse is that, Stan?”

“It’s from fucking Hamlet, dumbass,” says Bev. She’s got a whole armchair to herself, which really isn’t fair. It’s Bev, though, so really, it’s the fairest thing in the world. Still, Richie pads over to the chair and throws himself across her lap. 

“You wound me, Beverly,” he says mournfully as she ‘oof’s and punches him in the thigh. “You’re wounding me!” 

“You’re wounding _me_!” She doesn’t push him off after that, though, just shifts underneath him so he’s not crushing her legs so much. It’s a fair tradeoff for such a comfortable seat. “You’ve got such a bony ass,” she grumbles.

“More to love,” says Richie.

“That’s not—what—?” The utter bewilderment in Bev’s voice is delightful.

“More to love,” Richie insists.

“So marinara, then!” Ben proclaims loudly. He claps twice and stands from the couch. “I’ll get the pasta started. Marinara is easier and faster, anyway, and I’m sure everyone’s hungry.”

“Starving,” says Richie, languishing. Or at least the picture of himself he has in his head is languishing. He looks quite dashing, if he says so himself. Very fetching. Like Rose posing for Jack on the Titanic, except Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t here, nobody is painting him, and his tits aren’t out. Otherwise, though, it’s exactly the same.

“Maybe if you ate something more than snack bags of chips and energy drinks, you wouldn’t get so hungry by dinnertime,” Bev says, poking him in the side. 

“Bev, darling, I’m a connoisseur of fine cuisine,” Richie says. His languishing intensifies. It’s sort of hurting his spine.

“I literally watched you eat some Cheez-Its out of the sofa cushion crease yesterday,” Eddie cuts in.

Richie waves a hand. “The past is the past,” he insists.

“I’m pretty sure you accidentally swallowed a nickel this morning because you were eating the M&Ms you got out of the bottom of Bev’s purse too fast,” Mike points out. He seems mostly amused, and very hot, as always, so Richie has to unswallow his tongue in order to reply.

“It was a dime, for your information,” he says. “And I don’t appreciate the insinuations going on here.”

Bev gently drums her fingertips against Richie’s ribs. He may or may not shiver. He’s only human. “Aww, baby,” she coos. “Are we being too mean to you?”

“Yes,” Richie says. His voice is pretty steady, which is impressive, as his bisexuality is perking up with familiar curiosity. “It’s very hurtful.”

Bev wraps her arms around his waist as well as she can from her angle and smushes a kiss to the side of his neck, the farthest she can reach. 

The thing… the thing is. The thing. Is. Richie’s not unaware of certain blossoming _things_ taking place in this house. It can sometimes be hard to keep track of, especially when he’s so distracted by his own blossoming _things_. When he’s not distracted, though, it’s just amazing to watch. 

Bill and Bev were already sort of seeing each other when they all got put in this house, but neither of them seems to care whether they see other people either – which is good, because Bill has definitely got _something_ going on with Stan, as evidenced by the way their legs are pressed up against each other on the couch and they keep looking sideways at one another when the other isn’t looking. Bev sometimes sleeps over in Ben and Mike’s room, but Bill sometimes does that, too. And Richie has definitely had too many rum and cokes and made out with Bev fully-clothed in the bathtub once or twice.

He figures, hey. That’s college for you. Everybody kisses their friends in college, right?

The only one whose relationships are totally a mystery to Richie, frankly, is Eddie, who Richie wants to know more about than anybody in the whole goddamn world.

But if Eddie is fooling around with anybody in the house, or wants to, or has ever thought about it, Richie has no clue. He desperately wants to have a clue, even one single tiny clue what Eddie might be into, because he would whittle himself into whatever that is like a chainsaw carver sculpting a block of ice into a masterpiece.

He doesn’t know, though. So all he can do is be regular ol’ Richie and hope that someday down the line, Eddie might look twice at that.

“Stop sulking,” Bev whispers to him. Richie drags himself out of his thoughts and becomes aware that the conversation has moved on without him. That’s another thing that Richie likes about living with these folks. None of them mind that sometimes he disappears into his own head for a little bit.

“I’m not,” Richie replies in the same quiet tone. “I’m being thoughtful.”

“And I’m the Pope,” Bev snorts. She leans her head onto Richie’s shoulder. “You okay?” She doesn’t say it like it’s a big deal question, leaving Richie the option of brushing it off.

“Yeah,” he sighs. He leans his head down onto hers. “Just having feelings.”

“Oh no,” Bev replies with a pat to his stomach. “Not feelings!”

“I know,” Richie agrees. “The worst.”

Bev doesn’t make him talk about it any more than that, but she gives him an extra piece of garlic bread at dinner, which is basically the same thing as a hug.

When Richie is the last to leave the living room that night, he can’t help but notice that Stan has quietly retired to Bill and Bev’s room instead of the one he shares with Richie and Eddie. Richie shrugs, closing the door behind him and immediately yanking his shirt off.

“Not on the floor!” Eddie yelps from where he’s sitting cross-legged on his own bed, still made from this morning of course. Richie’s own bed is a mishmash of mismatched sheets and blankets, none of which have hospital corners like Stan’s immaculately made bed or Eddie’s own tidy one. “You have a laundry basket for a reason!”

“Huh.” Richie looks from the shirt in his hand to the aforementioned basket, one of the only places on his side of the room that isn’t covered in clothing. “Good point, dear chap. You’re a real mate.” He shoves his shirt into the basket, and he thinks Eddie might actually breathe a sigh of relief.

Richie lowers himself onto his bed, leaning back onto his hands. His eyes are drawn to Stan’s empty bed like a moth to a flame, and he can feel the corner of his mouth turning down. When he makes himself look away, he meets Eddie’s eyes, like they were both looking at the same thing.

Eddie clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. He sounds tentative, like Eddie rarely does around Richie anymore. “Have you ever… thought about…”

“What?” Richie prompts when Eddie doesn’t continue. Normally, he’d make some stupid joke here, because he can’t not make jokes in inappropriate situations, but something about the dim light and dark hush make him hesitate.

“Do you think maybe, like… I don’t know who’s fucking who in this house and it stresses me out.” It comes out like a confession, Eddie with one of the fastest deliveries of any sentence Richie’s ever heard. Once he’s parsed what he actually said, he chokes on his own spit.

“I mean,” he croaks. “I—yeah. Yeah, all the time. You, too?”

Eddie gestures vaguely at Stan’s bed. “I mean, is that a thing? Is that a new thing? Did I miss that?” he asks.

“Right?” Richie says. He scoots forward on his own bed so that he can face Eddie more directly. “Like, I knew he and Bill kind of had this weird energy between them, but I just thought maybe they landed on each other at Spin the Bottle sometime and never got over it. I didn’t think anything was _happening_.”

A snort. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening with those two, but I know Bev asked Ben if she could stay with him and Mike tonight.”

“Yeah!” Richie exclaims. He flaps his hand at the door. “And what about that, huh?”

“She’s with Bill, isn’t she? Bev’s not a cheater.”

“But sometimes Bill’s with Mike, I think!” Richie makes a conscious effort to lower his voice. “And I don’t think anyone’s cheating on anyone. I just think maybe they have an agreement or something.”

“An agreement?” Eddie asks. He wrinkles his nose. “That only happens in bad books.”

“Okay, first of all, please let me know the titles of some of these books you’ve been reading,” says Richie. “Second of all, look, okay, I may have… had a dalliance or two. With our young Miss Marsh.”

“_What_?” Eddie asks in the quietest screech Richie’s ever heard. “Am I the only person who’s not—not—part of this six-way fuckfest?”

“Okay, Drama Club, let’s calm down a sec,” Richie says in a rush. He flaps his hands in an up-and-down motion that he hopes conveys a desire for inside voices. “We were both drunk, all twice that it happened, and it was definitely not a _fuckfest_, wow, you kiss my wife with that mouth?”

“Your—what are you—Richie!” Eddie’s face is flushed red enough that Richie’s concerned for his health. Eddie digs into his bedside drawer and pulls out his inhaler, shoving it into his mouth so hard his teeth clack against the metal.

“Sorry, sorry—poorly timed joke about me and your mom being happily married, you know how I am, come on, I’m fuckin’ gross,” Richie says. He hopes he’s adopted a soothing tone. From the way Eddie glares at him and takes another puff on his inhaler, he may not have been successful there.

“Well, what is it, then?” Eddie asks, still short of breath even as he drops his inhaler back into the drawer. “I know people experiment at college or whatever, but this doesn’t feel like that.”

“I don’t know,” Richie admits. He scratches the back of his neck. “I just know that Bev and I had a nice time and I felt like shit about it until she told me Bill wouldn’t mind. I thought she mighta been full of it, but then _Bill_ told me he didn’t mind later that day. So I figured he would know whether or not he minded, right?”

“So, what, you’re all just hooking up all over the place?” Eddie looks suspiciously at Richie’s side of the room, as though he’ll see evidence of past acts there. He wrinkles his nose. “Seems unsanitary.”

“Not for nothing, but it was only ever silly drunk stuff with Bev, kissing a little, you know? And it only happened two times.” For god’s sake, Richie thinks he’s teetering on the edge of a blush. “Nothing else with no-one else. Swear.”

Eddie’s mouth lifts in a weak smirk. “Except my mom, right?”

“Well, I thought that was a given.” Richie gives Eddie a hesitant smile. “And you? Nobody?” He tries to ask it casually. It’s hard when he wants to know this more than who killed JF-fuckin’-K.

“No, nobody,” Eddie says. Unless Richie’s imagining it, he sounds miffed about it. “I didn’t even know any of this was going on at all.”

“Say, good fella,” says Richie, struck with a sudden and devious idea, as most of his ideas are. “You wouldn’t be interested in, maybe, you know… finding out more about what’s going on in this house, would you?”

Eddie scowls thoughtfully at him. “Go on,” he says.

“Look, two heads are better than one, right?” Richie asks. He rubs his hands together. “We can cover more ground together. Figure out who’s shackin’ up with who, bumpin’ uglies, makin’ the beast with two—”

“Okay!” Eddie interrupts. He holds up a hand, but he’s not scowling anymore. He just looks thoughtful. “I have to admit, I like the idea of knowing what’s going on under our own roof,” he says.

Richie wiggles his eyebrows. “Then it’s settled!” he exclaims. He scoots off the edge of his bed and bounds the three long steps to Eddie’s. With a rare moment of inhibition, he motions to the bed. “Mind?”

There’s a moment that feels like years in Richie’s mind but must only be seconds, where Eddie is looking up at him with those big brown doe-eyes and Richie would love to lean down and—

“Sure,” says Eddie. He shuffles over on the bed, the tips of his toes peeking from the frayed legs of his pajama pants. He’s warm, and close enough for Richie to feel that when he sits next to him.

“Okay,” says Richie. He ducks his head toward Eddie and finds the action mirrored. “Let’s make a fucking plan.”

The plan they come up with is rudimentary at best, especially considering that they stayed up until three in the morning going over the details. Richie was late for his nine o’clock class. He would’ve been late for it anyway, but it’s the principal of the thing.

Eddie’s contributions had been based in the concept that talking openly and using good communication skills would be the secret to getting their answers. That sounded like a bunch of bullshit to Richie, so he’d suggested getting everyone drunk and prying the truth out of them. Eddie hadn’t liked that idea much.

Eventually, though, they came to an accord. They would combine Eddie’s open communication theory with Richie’s truth-prying theory and see what came of it.

He’s not off to a great start. A late morning combined with his Thursday class schedule means he’s out of the house until six that night, and the most he sees any of his housemates in the middle is Ben shoving a granola bar into his hands as they pass on the quad. Richie shoves it whole into his mouth and tries not to choke to death on it.

It’s a quieter house than he’s expecting when he gets home. He’d forgotten that this is Bev’s poker night, and most of the others will be at work. He’s pretty bummed that he won’t get to demonstrate his expert ability to meddle in peoples’ personal lives until he hears the sound of chair legs scraping across the floor in the kitchen.

“Hey!” he calls experimentally, unwinding the scarf from around his neck and tossing it vaguely near the coatrack. If it was meant to be, it’ll make its way there eventually.

“H-hey,” comes the response, and Richie grins to himself. Excellent. Bill is complete shit at hiding anything from anyone. Bless his heart, he’s the kindest emotionally volatile person Richie’s ever met. Never met an emotion he couldn’t wear on his sleeve, Bill Denbrough. “How was c-class?”

“Ugh, garbage,” Richie says as he swings himself into the kitchen. It’s just Bill there, as Richie might have surmised, and he’s got a package of Oscar Meyer chili-cheese dogs in front of him that he’s squinting at the back of. “But enough about me. let’s talk about you.” He grabs one of the chairs at the table and clatters it around to straddle it backwards, blinking expectantly at Bill.

“W-what?” Bill asks. He’s distracted, so Richie doesn’t blame him. “C-can you m-microwave these?”

“You can microwave anything,” says Richie dismissively. “Except chicken, unless you want Ben to get mad. Those are pretty good cold, though.”

Bill looks at Richie askance, a little curl to his lip. “That sounds disgusting,” he says. He fishes one of the hot dogs out of the package and bites off the end of it. “Gross,” he announces. He puts the rest of that hot dog and two more whole ones onto a paper plate, turning and putting them into the microwave.

“So,” Richie says while Bill is punching in the cook time. “You and Bev are doing well, I hope?”

“Yeah, of c-course,” says Bill, resealing the package of hot dogs to put them back into the refrigerator. “Why w-wouldn’t we be?”

“No reason,” Richie says. He hadn’t thought much about what this conversation would entail, in truth. “Uhh. Just, you know. Thinking about stuff. The way relationships can change, you know.”

Bill does not look like he knows. “Sure,” he says anyway. God, Richie loves this guy. “Relationships are c-complicated sometimes.”

“Are they?” Richie seizes on that. “Like, even you and Bev?”

A smile plays at the edges of Bill’s lips. “Y-yeah, course. That’s p-part of the fun, right?”

“_Fun_,” Richie repeats. He leans forward in his seat as much as he can with the back of the chair in the way. Bill looks sort of alarmed. “You guys have a lot of fun?”

“Y-yeah,” Bill says. He tilts his head at Richie. “You okay, R-Rich?”

“Outstanding,” Richie dismisses. “I was just thinking, you know. About, uh, about that time?”

“That t-time?” Bill asks. He retrieves his hot dogs from the microwave as it beeps insistently at him, looking down at the plate in dismay. “They exploded,” he says to Richie.

“I can see that. Looks delicious,” Richie replies, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “That time. With Bev? After the New Year’s party?”

“Oh. That t-time.” Bill’s smiling again, stabbing into one of the hot dogs with a plastic fork. “Why were you thinking about th-that?”

“No reason, no reason,” Richie says. He hadn’t planned on delving into this, actually, but he’s always been a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy. “Just… thinking about it.”

“D-did you want to do it again?” Bill prompts. “I think she’ll be out l-late tonight, but she’s not doing anything t-tomorrow, far as I kn-know. We were just t-talking about that, a-actually.”

“That’s not what I was, uh, you were?” Richie asks. He has to stop and think over the last thirty seconds of conversation. “Why?”

Bill shrugs a shoulder and offers the plate of hot dogs to Richie, who takes one, of course, his stomach rumbling with displeasure. “You b-both seemed to have a g-good time. Bev likes m-making you smile.”

“Well, she’s a great fuckin’ lady, y’know,” Richie mumbles. This is a whole different conversation than he thought he’d be having. “But, wait, I know you said it was okay that one time, but I figured that was just, you know. You being too nice for your own good.”

Bill blinks at him. He has a little smear of chili at the corner of his mouth. “N-no,” he says slowly. “I t-told you I didn’t m-mind if you two wanted to d-do stuff.”

“Yeah!” Richie says. He gestures to Bill with his hot dog, and flicks chili-cheese onto the countertop. “Too nice for your own good,” he repeats, swiping at the specks with his sleeve.

“N-no,” Bill says. He’s looking at Richie indulgently. “I d-don’t say things I don’t m-mean. B-Bev and I don’t hold each other d-down. She can do wh-what she wants. I can do what I w-want.”

Richie tries to figure out what the fuck that means while Bill carefully cuts the last hot dog in half and nudges half of it toward Richie.

“What the fuck does that mean?” he finally asks outright, which goes more along with Eddie’s plan than his own, but he’s so fucking confused.

Bill smiles sideways at him, swipes the back of his wrist over his mouth. “It’s easy when people like each other, r-right?” he asks.

“I guess,” says Richie. He’s not sure at all what this conversation is about anymore. “I guess I still just feel bad, you know? For making a move on your girl.”

Bill sighs heavily, shakes his head, almost rolls his eyes. “Th-that’s where your p-problem is. She’s not _m-my_ girl. She can make a m-move on whoever she w-wants.”

“And so can you?” Richie asks. He finds himself, unconscionably, getting distracted by the way the light hits Bill’s eyes. 

Bill smiles at him again, one of those quiet, knowing sort of smiles, and twists the cap off a water bottle. “Uh-huh,” he says. He takes a drink.

“Oh,” says Richie. He tries to find a word, any word in his vocabulary other than ‘oh,’ but he isn’t sure any of them would be helpful right now.

“I’m gonna go st-study,” Bill says, throwing away the chili-smeared paper plate. “I’ll talk to you l-later, okay?”

“Okay,” says Richie. He can feel his eyebrows pulling together. He feels like he both did and didn’t find out what he wanted to know during this conversation.

His brow can’t help but un-frown, though, when Bill leans down as he walks past Richie’s chair and kisses his forehead. It’s very like Bill to spring this kind of casual intimacy on his friends, and yet Richie finds himself kind of floored by it every time.

“Y-you should talk to M-Mike,” Bill says softly. “He was c-confused, too.”

“Okay,” Richie says again. He looks up, and his glasses pinch the bridge of his nose uncomfortably, and Bill kisses him right on the mouth. “Oh,” he says. It’s muffled by Bill’s lips. He shuts up, because _wowza, Bill’s lips_, and kisses back even though he’s still confused. Richie’s never been one to turn down a nice kiss, which is what got him in the mess in the first place, as he recalls, but. He is who he is.

Bill sighs against Richie’s mouth and it makes a shiver roll down his spine, slow undulations like heartbeats. When Bill leans back, Richie finds himself lolling forward, trying to steal another one. Bill smiles at him again, his eyes bright and greener than Richie’s ever noticed before. 

“Now we’re e-even,” he says. His hand is resting gently on the side of Richie’s neck. “Bev said you were g-good. She was right.”

“Uh-huh,” Richie breathes. He rolls his bottom lip into his mouth, lets his teeth sink into it. The bright flash of pain lifts his brain out of the fog it tends to sink into when he’s being kissed. “Sure thing.” He doesn’t remember what they were talking about.

Bill squeezes lightly and then lets go, offering Richie another one of his little smiles, this time with a wink. “Talk to M-Mike,” he repeats. Then he’s gone, wafting out the door like a ship passing in the night, if the ship was wearing a backwards cap that said ‘babygirl’ on it.

It really gives Richie a lot to think about. It also makes him need a shower, like, immediately, but he does his best thinking in the shower.

It’s just his luck, of course, that he almost bumps right into Mike on the way out of the bathroom after his shower. His hair is flopping all over the place, dripping into his eyes, the rivulets trickling down his neck still faintly purple from an ill-advised dyeing experiment last month. When he tries to flip it up off his forehead, he winds up flicking cold lavenderish water all over Mike’s face.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, horrified, his hands reaching and fluttering with the desire to do something and the inability to actually do anything about what just happened. “I’m so sorry, fuck.”

“No problem,” says Mike, a wry smile on his face. He swipes his fingers over his eyes. “I know the risks of standing in the radius of a potential Tozier hair flip.”

Richie laughs, pushing his wet hair back behind his ears. He’s very conscious, all of a sudden, of the fact that Bill had told him to talk to Mike earlier, and that he’s only wearing boxers, and that Mike’s eyes seem to be following a droplet of mauve water as it trails down Richie’s collarbone. 

“Hey, you busy?” Richie asks. It’s abrupt, but Mike doesn’t seem phased.

“Nah, not really. Everything cool?” 

“Yeah, yeah, just. Something Bill told me to talk to you about,” Richie ventures.

“Mm.” Mike nods, like it’s something he was expecting. “Yeah, he said you might wanna talk to me. Your place or mine?” he asks, sweeping his hand with a flourish.

“Uh, maybe yours.” Richie doesn’t know what this conversation’s going to involve, but he doesn’t think he wants Eddie or Stan to walk in in the middle of it.

Though, if Eddie walked in, it would just save on having to tell him later. But then Richie wouldn’t have an excuse to talk to Eddie later. This is all so complicated.

Richie’s half-expecting Ben to be in his and Mike’s room when Mike leads him there, but he isn’t. From the smells wafting up from downstairs, he’s probably making dinner, actually. 

“So,” says Mike, sitting on his bed and gesturing for Richie to sit next to him, which he does. “What did you want to talk about?” He’s got this amused look on his face as he turns toward Richie, leaning his chin into his hand.

“You know… baseball,” Richie invents, because Mike looks, as he always does, really fucking good, and Richie just cooled down from the thing with Bill in the kitchen, and Mike keeps looking at him like he might want to do something similar. Or maybe Richie’s imagining it. The sexual tension (or sexual resolution, if his suspicions are correct) in this house might just be going to his brain.

Mike’s eyebrows slowly raise. “Baseball,” he repeats. “Okay. Not what I thought we were gonna talk about, but I’ll bite. What about baseball?”

Richie doesn’t know fucking anything about baseball. “Uh,” he says. “You know how in baseball, there’s like. They’re on a team?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Mike. He looks like he knows Richie doesn’t know fucking anything about baseball. “They sure are.”

“We’re kinda like a team, aren’t we?” Richie asks. What the fuck is he talking about? “All of us, right? We’re a big team?”

“Mhm,” Mike says. He reaches over and puts a hand on Richie’s leg. It’s really warm. And big. “Hey, Rich?”

“Uh-huh?” Richie says, still very distracted by the hand on his thigh. 

“Is it cool if I kiss you?”

Richie’s brain has a moment where it tries to rip itself in half, still focused on Mike’s hand but also desperately needing to be focused on the words Mike is saying. 

“Me?” he asks. It feels like maybe there were a few dozen other things he could have said that would have been better than that, but that’s what comes out.

Mike laughs, though. He’s got a great fucking laugh. “Yeah, dude. You.”

“Well,” Richie says. He blinks owlishly. “Well, fuck yeah, then.”

“Good.” Mike grins at him. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

And then Mike is _fucking kissing the shit out of him_.

It’s not like the kiss with Bill in the kitchen. It’s not like the times he’s kissed Bev, either, silly and giggling, or any number of other anonymous kisses with anonymous people. It’s not like any of those. This kiss is like the gold fucking medal in the kissing Olympics.

It’s one of Mike’s big hands in Richie’s hair, his other hand curling around Richie’s waist, pulling him in closer. Mike’s chest is broad and warm where he presses against Richie, and he practically climbs onto Mike’s lap in order to get closer to him still, soak up all that warmth, a moth to a flame.

Mike smiles into the kiss, a difficult thing to do, and Richie finds that he’s smiling, too, which makes it even harder to kiss, until they’re both basically just pressing their smiles together. Barely even a kiss at all, and still one of the best kisses Richie’s had in his entire life.

“Wow,” Richie mutters. He says it into Mike’s mouth, which is wild as hell. Mike gently bites his lower lip, which makes him want to say ‘wow’ again. He holds it back.

“Yeah,” replies Mike, pressing another little kiss to the corner of Richie’s mouth. “Right?”

“That’s not really what I meant to talk to you about, I don’t think,” Richie admits. He’s having a hard time remembering what it _is_ that he wanted to talk to Mike about. Honestly, Bill had been reticent on the details in the first place. He’d just said to talk to Mike. Technically, they talked. A little. Sort of.

“Hey,” says Mike. “We’re still here. We can still talk.”

“In a minute,” Richie mumbles. He pulls Mike back in. They don’t talk for quite a while.

Dinner is… interesting. Richie is still in a daze from the pre-dinner festivities with Mike, and it doesn’t help that Bill and Bev both keep looking at him and then smiling at each other. Eddie keeps looking at him, too, but mostly to frown. He looks jittery, too, a nervous energy around him that Richie can’t place.

At least Ben is still behaving normally. He gives Richie an extra breadstick, too, and tells him it’s because he’s getting too skinny. Ben is, in some ways, just Richie’s bubbe in the body of a nineteen-year-old paleontology major.

Eddie doesn’t get less jittery after dinner, when Richie raises his eyebrows at him in a way that he hopes indicates that he wants to meet up and talk about their findings. In fact, impossibly, Eddie might get more jittery. He doesn’t follow Richie to the bathroom, either, so maybe Richie’s just really shitty at getting across his point without words.

He takes a piss, since he’s there anyway, and his heart jumps in his chest when the door nudges open while he’s washing his hands. He’s not _disappointed_, exactly, that it’s Bev instead of Eddie, but he’s allowed to wish stuff, at least to himself.

“Hey,” Bev says, leaning a hip against the door and watching Richie with what feels like unnecessary intensity.

“I could’ve had my wang out, you know,” Richie says, going for chiding and not quite hitting it.

“Horrifying, conceptually,” Bev replies. She folds her arms across her chest. “I heard you talked to Bill.”

“God, shit gets around here fast,” Richie mumbles, opening the medicine cabinet in order to dig his toothbrush out. He always knows which is his. It has Spider-Man on it. He got it at the dollar store and it’s technically for, like, eight-year-olds but Richie does historically have extremely soft teeth, so he thinks it’s appropriate. “Do you guys have some sort of secret club where you just talk about how handsome I am?”

“Something like that,” Bev says, watching him put toothpaste on the brush. “Mostly we talk about how handsome Bill is.”

“That’s valid,” says Richie. He shoves his toothbrush into his mouth so that he won’t say anything else.

“Anyway, he said he kind of talked to you about our situation, and I wanted to make sure you were cool with it,” Bev continues. “Not that I’ve ever thought you wouldn’t be cool with it, obviously. I don’t know. You seemed kind of weird at dinner. Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

Richie swishes toothpaste around in his mouth for far longer than he needs to, but he can’t just hold it in his mouth forever. He spits, then swipes his wrist across his chin. “No,” he says slowly. “Not paranoid, just… I kissed Mike,” he says abruptly. “Or Mike kissed me. Or we kissed each other. It was very mutual.”

“Oh.” Bev looks surprised, but not upset. “Wow, are you trying to collect the whole set?”

“What?”

“Never mind. That’s cool. That’s cool, right?” she checks.

“I thought it was pretty cool,” Richie says. He flexes his fingers, wishing he had something to occupy them. “I don’t think Mike thought it was un-cool.”

“So, what’s the problem?” Bev asks. She’s always been too perceptive for her own good.

“Who says there’s a problem?” replies Richie.

“Your face,” Bev says. She tilts her head at him, a move she must have gotten from Bill. It makes Richie want to spill his guts the same way, anyway. “Mike’s super hot. Kissing him looks like a lot of fun.”

“He is, and it was,” Richie says. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just still a little confused about the whole… thing. Not that thing, mostly. Well, a little. You know?”

“Not at all,” Bev admits. She moves farther into the room and closes the door. “Is it about Bill? Or Bill and me?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I just thought I knew how things were around here and it’s turning out I really don’t at all,” says Richie. He considers brushing his teeth again just to have something to do with his hands. “I thought you and Bill were a thing and that was kind of it.”

“Bill and I are definitely a thing,” Bev says. Her eyes are very clear and pretty. “It’s just that, you know, sometimes we’re things with other people.”

“Like Mike?” Richie asks. He’s not sure he wants to know the answer.

“Sure, like Mike,” Bev says agreeably. “I haven’t really explored anything with him, but Bill has. A lot. Or sometimes Ben and I go on coffee dates, or sometimes I fool around with you in bathtubs.” She shrugs. “Those are all things, aren’t they?”

“I guess.” Richie says it slowly, feeling out what he wants to say next. “What about Stan?” He swallows. “Or, like, Eddie. For example.”

“Ugh, god, Bill and Stan were flirting around for-fucking-ever until I basically forced them to talk to each other. It was absolutely insufferable.” Bev shakes her head. “But yeah, that’s definitely a thing. I haven’t done anything with Eddie, though, and Bill would’ve told me if he had. I can’t speak for anyone else, though.”

Richie gives in and picks up his toothbrush so that he can rub the ridge of his thumb over the rubberized picture of Spider-Man on the front of it. “Yeah, sure, okay,” he says. “I—I’m not upset or anything,” he makes sure to say. “I just didn’t know any of this, so it’s a lot to take in.”

“Yeah, of course,” says Bev, her brow furrowing. She puts a hand on Richie’s shoulder. “Take your time. I thought we all made it pretty obvious, but I guess not.”

Richie thinks about dinner last night, about Bill and Stan’s legs pressed together, their bright eyes and pink cheeks. He thinks about Ben and Bev having sleepovers every other night, about times Stan’s come back to their room late and Richie just assumed he was up studying in the living room.

“No, I think it was,” he says, putting his toothbrush back into the medicine cabinet. “I’m just oblivious sometimes.”

“You?” Bev grins at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and she reaches up and ruffles his hair. “Never.”

“Laugh it up, Miss Marsh,” Richie says, haughty, sniffing. He bats at her hand and then reaches past her hip to open the door. 

“We do have really good conversations in this bathroom,” Bev muses. She gives him a little tap with her knuckles on his hip as she passes on her way to her own room.

“I don’t know if conversation is usually the right word for them,” Richie mutters in reply. Bev’s tinkling laugh follows him all the way to his room.

Stan is, perhaps for obvious reasons, not in their room when Richie shuffles into it. Eddie is, though, and he looks at Richie like a deer caught in headlights from where he’s buttoning his pajama shirt.

“How’s it hangin’, Eds?” Richie asks, doing his best to make the atmosphere less fraught. Fraught with what, he doesn’t know.

“Fine,” Eddie says in the least fine tone of voice anyone’s ever had.

“You know,” Richie says, “you’re the only person I know who wears pajama sets like they did in the fifties. I really admire you for that.”

“Oh, shut up,” Eddie grumbles. He adjusts his collar so that it’s lying flat. “I catch a chill easily.”

“Hey, I said I liked it!” Richie protests.

“Whatever,” says Eddie. He sits carefully on the edge of his bed. He seems hesitant, but plows forward after a moment, saying, “Is Stan in Bill and Bev’s room?”

“I didn’t see him go in there, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Boy, you would not believe the weird shit that’s happened to me today,” Richie says, stripping off his shirt and throwing it at his hamper. He does the same with the jeans he’s wearing, then tosses himself back on his bed with a sigh. “What?” he asks when he notices that Eddie is scowling at him.

“I just—I just can’t stand you sometimes,” Eddie replies.

“I didn’t even do anything!” exclaims Richie. He heaves an exaggerated sigh. “You’re always so mean to me, Eds. I’m gonna start thinking you don’t like me.”

He’s fully expecting Eddie to say something to that, some barbed response that Richie will reply to with a joke, of course, like always. Instead, there’s a long silence, and when Richie peeks an eye open to see what the hold-up is, Eddie’s face is splotched with red, and he’s frowning again.

“Okay,” Richie says, unsure of what he’s saying it in response to. “Did you find out anything for our plan today? Because I found out a whole hell of a lot, let me tell you.”

“Not really,” Eddie says. It sounds shifty. Eddie’s never shifty. “I was in class or at work most of the day. What did you find out?”

“Okay, so, we were totally right, by the way,” Richie begins. “Or, really, you were right. Mostly. There is definitely something at least fuckfest-adjacent going on in this house.”

“That’s the grossest way I’ve ever been told I’m right,” says Eddie.

“Yeah, yeah. So, anyway, Bill and Bev have this _agreement_, I guess, that they can do whatever with whoever as long as the other person’s okay with it? I think? Because Bill is definitely shacking up with Mike and Stan, and Bev is definitely making time with Ben.”

“And you,” Eddie says. What’s that tone in his voice? Richie hates not being able to figure things out. Kind of what started this whole thing. “Don’t forget you.”

“Semantics,” says Richie. “And if drunken smooching counts as making time, I gotta tell ya, Eds, I’m the fucking Gordon Ramsay of time-making.”

Eddie sighs. How does he make sighs sound so judgmental? It’s a skill Richie really wishes he had himself. It’d be very useful. “How did you find all of this out?” he asks. Richie was hoping he wouldn’t. “Did you decide that my idea of open, honest communication was the best way to go?”

“Well, I didn’t decide that, no. It was decided for me by our friends refusing to let me be sneaky like good friends would,” says Richie. He pushes himself up to lean against his headboard. “I talked to Bill, and that explained a little, and then he told me to talk to Mike, so I did.”

“Uh-huh,” says Eddie. Considering how far away their beds are from each other, Eddie really has a strong stare. “And what did he say?”

“Uh. Well.” Richie really should have thought this through. “Not much. Actually.”

Eddie makes a disgusted noise. “I’m starting to think you didn’t actually find out anything from anyone.”

“I mean, we didn’t talk much. Verbally.” Richie scratches his chest. It’s very hard to avoid Eddie’s gaze when it’s burning Richie’s face like a brand.

“Oh, my god.” Let nobody say Eddie Kaspbrak doesn’t catch on quickly. “Seriously?”

“I’m always serious,” says Richie. He finger-guns at nobody. Certainly not at Eddie, still staring him down across the room.

“… Huh.” Eddie doesn’t sound nearly as upset as Richie thought he might. “That’s interesting.”

“… Is it?” Richie asks, doubtful. He thought it was pretty interesting, but then again, he was _there_, and being kissed by Mike, so if he didn’t think it was interesting, he’d be up for Monkhood. Is that how that works?

“Well, no, I mean, yes.” Eddie, when Richie finally works up the nerve to look at him, is blushing almost burgundy and squirming where he sits. “See, I knew that communication was the key to answers, so I met with Stan for lunch and I kind of. Asked him about the whole thing.”

“Of course you did,” Richie says with a sigh. He’s so hopelessly endeared by this fucking guy. “Did you shine a light in his eyes and threaten to throw the book at him while you interrogated him?”

“I was very calm and reasonable,” Eddie huffs. “I just asked why he hasn’t been coming back to our room as much lately, and also how long he’s been screwing Bill.”

Richie laughs so suddenly that it feels like all of the air escaping from a balloon.

“Fuck,” he gasps when he can manage any breath at all. “Fuck, I love you.”

“Yes, well, anyway,” says Eddie primly. He’s still blushing. “He said that it hadn’t been going on very long, and that they were kind of taking it slow to see how it goes. And,” he clears his throat again, “that he waited so long because he felt bad about liking two people and he didn’t want to hurt anyone by trying to pursue anything with both of them.”

“Okay, so Bill, obviously, but who’s the other person?” Richie asks. 

There’s another long silence. Richie looks at Eddie. Eddie very, very much does not look at Richie.

“Oh.” Richie’s stomach constricts, like it wants to growl even though he’s not hungry. “I, oh.”

“So,” Eddie says. He’s staring at the ceiling, his hand twitching in the direction of his bedside drawer. “I told him that I knew how he felt, because _I_ liked two people, only I was too chickenshit to tell either of them. And then he kissed me.”

Richie feels hollowed out and cold. Like an empty piñata floating in the Arctic. “Well, I’m happy for you guys,” he says. His voice is flat. He doesn’t even have any right to feel like this. It’s hypocritical. He kissed Mike like two hours ago. He kissed Bill in the same _day_. He was thinking _yesterday_ about how much he liked Stan's new haircut, how it made him look a little disheveled and how that was really, really fucking hot, actually. There’s no reason for him to feel like this. He clears his own throat. “Really,” he says with a little more conviction. He shakes his head to rid it of the roiling jealousy collecting there. He's not a jealous person by nature and he refuses to start being one now. “That’s fucking adorable.”

Eddie’s staring at him again. This stare is weird, though. Pointed, almost. “Rich,” he says quietly.

“What, Eds?” Richie says. He traces the edge of a stitched pattern on his bare mattress. “That’s cute as hell, seriously. Did you hold hands?”

“Yes, except then my hand got really sweaty and I was worried I was getting English sweating sickness, so we stopped.” There’s another short silence, and then the soft sounds of Eddie’s feet hitting the floor. Richie looks up, bewildered, but by then, Eddie is already next to his bed.

“What?” Richie asks.

“Can I?” replies Eddie, flapping a hand at Richie’s bed.

“Jesus, really?” asks Richie, but he scoots over anyway, and Eddie crawls right onto his bed with him. It’s a hoot and a half, clean pristine Eddie sitting on Richie’s dingy, bare mattress.

“Richie,” Eddie says again.

“What?” is, again, Richie’s reply.

Eddie sighs heavily, rolls his eyes, and leans up to kiss Richie on the cheek.

“What the fuck,” Richie mutters in the middle there somewhere. He’s in a daze, blinking at Eddie who is A.) still blushing and B.) very, very cute.

“You’re the other person, _obviously_,” Eddie says, sniffing snootily, like he isn’t blowing Richie’s fucking mind apart right now.

“The other person,” Richie says agreeably. “What are you talking about?”

“The other person I like,” says Eddie. “Were you not listening to me at all?”

“I figured it was fucking Bill!” Richie gestures vaguely at nothing. “Everybody likes Bill!”

“Well, yes, yeah,” says Eddie. “I figured Bill was like a gimme. Like the middle square on a Bingo card. I couldn’t say ‘Yes, Stan, I do like you, but I also like five or six other people, let me list them for you in sequential order.’”

“That sounds hot,” says Richie. Eddie squawks at him, blushing anew, and smacks him on the shoulder.

“You’re the worst,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t complain when Richie wraps an arm around his shoulder to pull him close. He might even settle in closer. “I just want you to know that.”

“Cold-hearted, Eds,” says Richie mournfully. “Cruelty like that can only be soothed by true love’s kiss.”

“The _worst_,” Eddie emphasizes. 

“But you still like me, so what does that make you?” Richie asks. He feels like he could conquer the world. Eddie could spit in his face right now and it wouldn’t change how happy he is at all. In fact, maybe it would turn him on. Who knows? Sometimes he thinks he would learn to love things he hates for Eddie. For all of them, really. He likes the people in this house a stupid, stupid amount.

“Stupid,” Eddie says, and for a moment, Richie thinks he’s reading his mind. “That’s what it makes me.”

“Or,” Richie suggests with, he hopes, a winning grin, “very smart.”

Eddie gives him a considering look. “I don’t think so,” he finally says, but he’s smiling, self-conscious, but smiling.

“Well,” says Richie, after a moment where neither of them says anything and they just smile at each other like the idiots they both definitely are. “This makes our plan more interesting.”

“Are we still going forward with the plan?” Eddie asks with raised eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it be a little redundant at this point?”

“Maybe,” Richie admits, shrugging. “But I hate to see a plan fall by the wayside. Don’t you want to see this thing to completion?”

“That depends,” says Eddie, “on what you would consider ‘completion.’ Frankly, the idea of what that word might mean to you scares me.”

Richie reaches over, hesitates for a moment, and then grasps Eddie’s hand, pressing their palms together. “Come on, Eds,” he says. He smiles again, unsure of why it doesn’t make Eddie look less suspicious. “Live a little.”

“Absolutely terrifying,” Eddie mutters, and he shivers when Richie laughs.

The next morning is… odd. Richie and Eddie leave their room together and run into Stan coming out of Bill and Bev’s. There’s a moment where Eddie and Stan look at each other, then look away, both flushed pink, and Richie thinks, yeah, okay. He had his moment of jealousy last night, but it’s hard to be jealous when he fell asleep holding Eddie’s hand. In the light of day, this is just goddamn adorable. He can feel a smile teasing at his lips.

“Mornin’, Stan,” he says cheerily. He tips Stan a jaunty salute, which earns him an odd look. Eddie elbows him in the ribs, just the cutest, and Richie puts a hand on his lower back to guide him toward the stairs. When he looks back, out of pure curiosity, he notices that Stan’s eyes are locked on his hand, Eddie’s back, and the look on his face isn’t jealousy, like Richie felt last night.

It’s more like whatever Richie felt just now. Fondness, maybe.

“Hey, losers!” Richie greets upon his entrance into the kitchen, happy that they’re all here for breakfast, for once. Usually, one or more of them have an early class to get to, but it’s Friday – a relatively easy day for them all. He grabs a bowl from the cupboard, reaching for a box of Frosted Flakes.

“You’re in a good mood this morning,” Ben notes with a half-smile, drowsy in a very attractive way. His hair looks soft. Richie gives it a ruffle because he can.

“You know what? Yes, I am,” he says. “And why shouldn’t I be?”

When he looks down the table, four different people are giving him pointed looks. He can’t help but find it hilarious that they’re all doing it for different reasons that are, to be honest, mostly the same reason.

“I’m just glad we’re all together,” he says. From the looks on the others’ faces, they get that he means it in as many ways as he possibly can.


End file.
